No NSA fears as tech hawks data-hungry devices

LAS VEGAS — The most significant privacy debate in recent history is rattling an NSA-wary Washington, but you wouldn’t have known it here at one of the largest tech gatherings in the world.

The International Consumer Electronics Show this week practically overflowed with gadgets that promise to improve daily tasks like driving and shopping — all by collecting consumers’ personal information. The flashy car systems, baby sensors, and smartphone-connected refrigerators and door locks amass truckloads of new data about users and their daily habits.

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That’s business-as-usual for Silicon Valley’s tech industry, where ever-more-granular details about consumers’ lives and preferences are seen as engines for innovation. But it provides a sharp contrast to the mood in the nation’s capital, where revelations about government surveillance are sparking heated political debate about the protections Americans should have from invasive snooping.

While many of the major tech companies at CES have lobbied to limit National Security Agency surveillance, the industry as a whole hasn’t turned its gaze inward to the information it also collects. The NSA bombshells instead have been afterthoughts here at the Vegas show, where the focus instead is on eye-popping new tech toys.

“I was a little surprised it hadn’t bled over to CES,” said Gary Shapiro, the head of the Consumer Electronics Association, about the privacy debates back in the Beltway.

But Shapiro, like others here, argued there’s a difference between the government collecting data and companies collecting information on their customers. People understand that turning over personal information is the “cost of admission” for using new products and services like the kind on display at the electronics show, he said.

And if CES indicated anything, it’s that companies are finding novel ways to amass that data.

Entire zones of the CES show floor this year were dedicated to devices like fitness trackers that share your glucose level with doctors and in-home systems that alert you when your fridge is empty. And carmakers are developing vehicles that understand your driving style — and moods — on the road.

The vision is that these tools can improve health, ease daily burdens like shopping and improve congestion on city streets. But the tradeoff is that users must reveal new aspects of their private lives — in ways they may not fully understand.

Washington in many ways is playing catchup on the privacy implications of these new commercial tools, and some at the CES want to keep it that way.

An entire panel devoted to the so-called “Internet of Things,” the wave of new digitally connected objects and appliances, argued against regulation of the emerging space. Robert McDowell, the former FCC commissioner now at the Hudson Institute, said government needs to “be very careful and allow markets to develop.” Another panel focusing on in-car computers echoed that same message, just days after a government watchdog faulted automakers over their practices in tracking drivers’ locations.

For the most part, though, privacy issues — and concerns about surveillance — were notably absent from the show.

When Cisco CEO John Chambers took the stage for a CES keynote, for example, he made no mention of the NSA, even after the company recently suggested it lost global business because of U.S. surveillance fears. Instead, Chambers talked up his vision for the “Internet of Everything,” describing $19 trillion up for grabs for companies that connect cities, homes and more.

For now, it’s the tech industry’s biggest names — including Google and Microsoft — that have had the most vocal reaction to the leaks from Edward Snowden. The companies and others, fearful that the NSA revelations are eroding public trust and global business, have pressed the Obama administration to limit government surveillance practices —even as they bristle at attempts to combine the issue with commercial privacy reform.

The NSA has been “hanging over all the privacy discussions on an international level, and even on a domestic level,” said FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen, an attendee in Las Vegas.

Asked, though, if the surveillance debate had fueled concerns about commercial privacy, she said: “I haven’t gotten that sense so much at CES.”